I have been doing fieldwork on Yaeyaman for the last 6 years or so, and a lot of that research has focused on the variety spoken in Miyara village. Below are some recordings I made illustrating a task I designed using the “pear story” video. The task requires two participants, and is divided into three parts. In part one, participant 1 watches the pear story video and describes it to participant 2, who cannot see the video. Participant 2 is allowed to ask questions of participant 1. In part 2, participant 2 summarizes the contents of the video based on what she heard from participant 1. Participant 1 is allowed to interrupt and provide corrections to this summary. In part 3, both participants watch the video, and discuss what they are seeing.
Task 1
Task 2
Task 3
The goal of this task is to get naturalistic data pertaining to:
- temporal distinctions (by comparing the time of the video event with the utterance time of the verbal form used to describe it),
- evidential distinctions (by having one participant witness the event, and the other hear a report),
- new/old information distinctions (from the first viewing of the video to the second and third),
- “informational authority” distinctions (based on who has privileged access to information).
I’m planning to replicate this task with a number of other varieties of Yaeyaman. The same task can of course be done with other (silent) films.
[Thank you to Naokichi and Tamiko Yamashiro for their participation in making these videos!]